Elliott, Julia. Hellions: Stories. Tin House, Portland, 2025. F;8/25.

I was intrigued by Elliott’s The Wilds story collection back in 2016. The title story was relentlessly wacky but also seemed to carry tacit reference to coming-of-age and gender in an interesting unconventional way. Only one of this new collection has the same wildly stark humour of that story which for me opened another side of the author’s vision. Here the preoccupation is more with supernatural humans and monsters. We keep getting lost in dangerous and horrifying enchanted forests or exposed to physically impossible people and situations which are either story fantasy or strange things in characters’ imaginations. Or both, of course. Always also present is Elliott’s use of immersing us scenes and places that are rotten, old, rundown, and usually smell bad.

A University undergraduate girl falls into sexual fascination with an unorthodox professor who seduces her in his forest home, changing back and forth from a conventional old man to a younger and much more vigourous humanoid.

I watched bone nubbins crack through his skull and flare into antlers. I watched eye bags shrink and wrinkles melt away. Black hair sprouted from his scalp and flowed down his back like a cape. He grew six inches. He climbed out of his pants. He cast off his shirt, puffed up his chest, and scratched his furry thighs. “It always itches at first,” he said, his voice husky and garbled. Howling, he came at me. I opened my arms to the beast. As his gamy tongue lashed at my throat, I couldn’t get naked fast enough.

A self-described high school nonconformist girl is internet-bullied by conventional popular kids while she finds a combination of spirituality and appearance of bizarre disease with an aquatic creature living in the drying-up pond near her run-down home.

The tender growths prickled when she touched them. Though she should have been horrified, she felt a dreamy fascination as she stroked the secret accretions that connected her to a magical creature, making her special.

In another story there is a convincingly banal contemporary artistic retreat of mothers and children where the kids are expected to work on socially acceptable creative projects. But the children get spiritually captured by two kids from the surrounding woods and are somehow convinced to produce electronic insect toys that hatch into dreadful creatures. This one reminded me of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go because of a kind of dystopic tone where clearly terrible things are simply accepted as unavoidable.

The only story with the crazy ironic family situation I saw in The Wild was All the Other Demons. Here a “wild” family, presented as somehow typical, is getting ready to watch The Exorcist (not for the first time) on TV. The toddler whose name is Cabbage is not allowed to participate. The dad is an uber-classic fake or truly easy-going macho man and the couple squabble as though this were ordinary and acceptable (mother to the kids):

“He’s an idiot bullshitter who comes from a long line of idiot bullshitters. I don’t know how he talked me into marrying him.” “You, a hick from the sticks, married me for my money.” “What money? Your drunken father lost it all.”

Dad in preparation for viewing the movie (Mum having temporarily stormed out of the house) prepares dinner: “When the fish had thawed into a gelatinous mass, Dad opened the microwave and unleashed smells of stagnant swamps, of drainage ditches and backwaters haunted by moaning ghosts.” and served “the fish with a bag of white Sunbeam bread and a bottle of Texas Pete. According to Dad, the bread would prevent us from choking on bones.” Elliott Again spicing up her realistic dysfunctional family with more horrible messes and dreadful smells.

Anyway the family scene (which of course is an Elliot-signature 1970s dump with damp shag carpet, turquoise formica and dark wood panelling) becomes somehow imaginatively or supernaturally subsumed by an even more horrifying version the famous movie and they all end up falling asleep huddled together in terror. The young girl imagines physically connecting with the TV and being told even worse stories of possession by the female lead of the movie.

I’m not sure what to make of this second set of spiritually disturbing stories which constantly skirt the edge of self-parody. Elliott holds nothing back and I would say her most enthusiastic fans would be the kind of people that enjoy movies and TV emphasizing the really outrageous. I’ve got to give Julia Elliott credit for going the distance into that territory, and for delivering it with a more-than-enthusiastic vocabulary and imagination.

But I guess I’m just too conventional. I find I’m most impressed when I get the feeling she is – however doubly ironically or seriously – making fun of the kind of readers I imagine she is writing for, and (I hope) of herself too.

7.9/8.7